Entries for 'michael'

You may be surprised by what I am about to say, but here goes: humans are not good problem solvers. Now, if there were a film, this would be the point at which the brakes are slammed and the care screeches to a holt, but hear me out. The reason that humans are not good problem solvers is because we have become hardwired to ignore the fact that most...

Recently there has been a quiet revolution growing, and no, I am not talking about the women’s marches in the US, or the Brexit protests in the UK, or even the rallies against climate change across Europe. No. What I am referring to is the revolution against clutter: the Marie Kondo effect (I did tell you it was a quiet revolution). For those...

I have grown up with a very idealised notion of love. I lay part of the blame at Disney’s door. Whilst there was not exactly an abundance (read: none) of gay Disney romances, it does have this tendency to perpetuate the idea that true love is out there and that all you have to do is wait and it will find you (ideally accompanied by a few misc...

I recently found myself being invited to celebrate the Jewish New Year, which continues to be a novelty for me as someone who until very recently could not tell you the difference between schvitzing and kvetching (and if you have not taken the module 1.0 in Yiddish expressions, they refer to sweating and complaining respectively). It was during thi...

Who am I? The great existential question of the times – well actually the great existential question of the times for many people is more likely to be, ‘do I want soy milk, coconut milk, almond milk, no milk, in my low-fat-no-fat-all-fat grande macchiato?’ But for those of us more inclined towards introspection, the ‘who am ...

Picture the scene: you have arrived to meet your friend in a nearby café, ready to fill them in on the juicy details of your date last night. It is fair to say it was one of the worst dates you’ve been on. They did not look their photo. They had all the charisma of a block of cheese. The music was too loud. They were too quiet. As you enterta...

The other day I found myself correcting a friend of mine who referred to himself as a member of the ‘expat community’ (he has been working in Rwanda for several months). I explained that what he should be saying was ‘migrant community’, but the trouble with this term is it rarely resonates with white Europeans – you on...